2003 Susan Sontag - Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels

FRIEDENSPREIS DES DEUTSCHEN BUCHHANDELS
us that he had fought with Pershing's army in
Mexico against Pancho Villa: this grizzled veteran
of an earlier American imperialist venture
had, it seems, been touched - in translation - by
the idealism of German literature, and, having
taken in my particular hunger for books, loaned
me his own copies of »Werther« and »lmmensee«.
Soon after, in my childhood orgy of reading,
chance led me to other German books, including
Kafka's »ln the Penal Colony,« where I discovered
dread and injustice. And a few years later,
when I was a high school student in Los Angeles,
I found all of Europe in a German novel. No
book has been more important in my life than
»The Magic Mountain" - whose subject is, precisely,
the clash of ideals at the heart of European
civilization. And so on, through a long life
that has been steeped in German high culture.
Indeed, after the books and the music, which
were, given the cultural desert in which I lived,
virtually clandestine experiences, came a real
experience. For I am also a late beneficiary of
the German cultural diaspora, having had the
great good fortune of knowing well some of the
incomparably brilliant Hitler refugees, those
writers and artists and musicians and scholars
that America received, starting in the 1930s, and
who so enriched the country, particularly its
universities. Let me name two I was privileged
to count as friends when I was in my late teens
and early twenties, Hans Gerth and Herbert
Marcuse; those with whom I studied at the University
of Chicago and at Harvard, Christian
Mackauer and Paul Tillich and Peter Heinrich
von Blanckenhagen, and in private seminars,
Aron Gurwitsch and Nahum Glatzer; and Hannah
Arendt, whom I knew after I moved to New
York in my mid-twenties - so many models of
the serious, whose memory I would like to evoke
here.
But I shall never forget that my engagement
with German culture, with German seriousness,
all started with obscure, eccentric Mr. Starkie (I
don't think I ever knew his first name), who was
my teacher when I was ten, and whom I never
saw afterward.
And that brings me to a story, with which I
will conclude - as seems fitting, since I am neither
primarily a cultural ambassador nor a fervent
critic of my own government (a task I perform
as a good American citizen). I am a storyteller.
So, back to ten-year-old me, who found
some relief from the tiresome duties of being a
child by poring over Mr. Starkie's tattered volumes
of Goethe and Storm. At the time I am
speaking of, 1943, I was aware that there was a
prison camp with thousands of German soldiers,
Nazi soldiers as of course I thought of them, in
the northern part of the state, and, knowing I was
Jewish (only nominally, my family having been
completely secular and assimilated for two generations,
but nominally, as I knew, was enough
for Nazis), I was beset by a recurrent nightmare
in which Nazi soldiers had escaped from the
prison and had made their way downstate to the
bungalow on the outskirts of the town where I
lived with my mother and sister, and were about
to kill me.
Flash forward to many years later, the
1970s, when my books started to be published
by Hanser Verlag, and I came to know the distinguished
Fritz Arnold (he had joined the firm
in 1965), who was my editor at Hanser until his
death in February 1999.
One of the first times we were together,
Fritz said he wanted to tell me - presuming, I
suppose, that this was a prerequisite to any
friendship that might arise between us - what he
had done during the war. I assured him that he
did not owe me any such explanation; but, of
course, I was touched by his bringing up the
subject. I should add that Fritz Arnold was not
the only German of his generation (he was born
in 1916) who, soon after we met, insisted on
telling me what he or she had done during the
Nazi era. And not all of the stories were as innocent
as what I was to hear from Fritz.
Anyway, what Fritz told me was that he had
been a university student of literature and art
history, first in Munich, then in Cologne, when,
at the start of the war, he was drafted into the
Wehrmacht with the rank of corporal. His family
was, of course, anything but pro-Nazi - his father
was Karl Arnold, the legendary political cartoonist
of »Simplicissimus« - but emigration
seemed out of the question, and he accepted,
with dread, the call to military service, hoping
neither to kill anyone nor to be killed.
Fritz was one of the lucky ones. Lucky, to
have been stationed first in Rome (where he
refused his superior officer's invitation to be
commissioned a lieutenant), then in Tunis; lucky
enough to have remained behind the lines and
never once to have fired a weapon; and finally,
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